On October 28, Anthropic announced that its life sciences team has established deep research collaborations with six drug discovery institutions, including Bristol Myers Squibb and Generate Biomedicines, and launched an autonomous drug discovery project, with the first focus on a rare childhood muscular dystrophy, where Claude handles most of the scientific and operational work.
Three researchers discussed the impact of GPT-6 Astra on robots, personal agents, and AI-driven drug discovery. Xu Huazhe said Astra shows strong adaptability and self-iteration in robot tasks, understanding 3D and quickly generating simulation environments; Zhu Zheqing said it offers stable improvements in long-horizon tasks and iteration over previous versions, though it is slower and still hallucinates in very long tasks; Wang Sheng took a cautious stance on AI in drug discovery.
On September 17, Anew Labs published a technical report on its official website, unveiling AnewDDE, an agent-driven drug discovery engine designed to integrate structure prediction, affinity assessment, and molecular design into a closed-loop system for biomolecular interaction modeling and molecular design.
In an interview, Insilico Medicine co-CEO and chief scientific officer Ren Feng said AI drug discovery has entered its "second half," with the focus shifting from improving R&D efficiency to improving success rates. He highlighted the company's H1 2026 revenue of $106.3 million (up 287.2% year-on-year), its first half-year profit since listing, cumulative contracted value of about $11 billion, 13 IND-approved drug candidates, and Rentosertib's Phase III trial with topline data expected in 2029.
ByteDance has spun off its AI drug discovery unit Anew Labs, which raised $290 million in funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion. ByteDance retains a 56% stake, with the round led by Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Hillhouse Investment.
On September 10, Insilico Medicine announced that the first patient had been enrolled and dosed in the Phase III clinical trial of Rentosertib at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, with the first patient also enrolled at Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital on the same day. The drug is the world's first to enter Phase III clinical trials with an AI-discovered target and an AI-designed molecule.